“I love you too,” I said, realizing how much I needed her in that moment.
It had by far been one of the shittest days I could remember, and the fact that I could wrap my arms around the girl I loved somehow made it all just melt away. I’d be alright. Just like with every other curveball I’d ever been thrown, I’d get through this too. I was good that way.
Fifty feet away, I could see Evan and our dad, or rather his dad – that was going to take some getting used to – talking. I watched the man I loathed smiling and nodding and laughing with my older brother, the interaction seeming so foreign to me. He’d never acted that way toward me. I tried to process the reality of the fact that I wasn’t related to him. And even though it was hard to wrap my head around the concept, I knew it was a good thing.
I wondered if Evan would want him to eat lunch with us after the ceremony. I had no desire to ask him to join us, especially now. But then Evan hugged him for a few seconds, said something I was too far away to hear, and they parted ways. As the jerk left, I found myself hoping it was the last time I’d ever have to see him, but I knew I wouldn’t get that lucky.
A few seconds later Evan walked toward us. He had a big fat smile on his face.
“He’s going to be pissed when he finds out,” Austin said then, having walked up next to me a few seconds before.
I nodded. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”
I wasn’t ruining his big day.
“I did it!” Evan cheered when he was a few feet from us, and I forced a smile on my face as I pulled him into a hug. Then he grabbed Austin, and the three of us had a moment right there in front of the auditorium.
“Congratulations, man,” I told him. “I’m proud of you.”
He grinned. “I’m proud of me too, little brother.” Then he looked over at Cassie and smiled.
“Congratulations,” she told him, and his smile got even wider.
Then he looked up at me for a few seconds and winked before grabbing her and pulling her into a hug. As he hugged her, he whispered something in her ear that made her smile, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then he released her and looked at her expectantly.
Her face broke into a wide grin. “I think so,” she said earnestly, and he laughed lightly.
“In that case, welcome to the family,” he said, and I noticed her blush a little as she smiled.
“What did I miss?” I asked, looking back and forth between the two of them.
They’d just met the night before and already they had secrets? Not that I didn’t want my brother to get along with my girlfriend, but what could he have possibly said to her? I was intrigued.
“Don’t worry about it, little brother,” Evan said then, and I knew it would be a futile attempt to push him to tell me. He wouldn’t do it.
“So where’s Tiff?” I asked him instead, looking around for his girlfriend.
“She’s with her parents. We’re doing family lunches, and then I’m taking her to dinner tonight,” he said patting the breast pocket of his suit. “Gonna ask the big question.”
“Are you serious?” Austin asked him, eyes wide.
Evan ruffled his hair. “Yeah, little man. What do you think about that?”
“I think she’s gonna say no,” Austin said, being a smartass. Then he laughed. “Just kidding. That’s awesome. So I guess you guys are going to move to Chicago together?”
I was kind of proud of my younger brother’s resilience in the face of what we’d just learned, but I knew that he had also disconnected himself emotionally from our father years ago. I wondered if this news would even faze him. They’d never had much of a relationship, so I imagined he’d be just fine. I was grateful for that.
Evan nodded. “Yeah, we got a little apartment near school. It’s so tiny, but it’ll be ours. I’m stoked.”
Evan was starting med school at the University of Chicago in a few weeks, and he was moving in with Tiffany. I felt a pang in my chest as I thought about that and looked over at Cassie. She was watching us with a small smile on her face. As Evan was talking about living with his girlfriend, my mind had drifted to things I wanted in life, and the idea of living with Cassie thrilled me like nothing else. But I knew it was too soon.
“Congratulations, man,” I said, coming back to the moment and clapping my brother on the back. I was happy for him and Tiff.
“Hey, she has to say yes first.”
“She will,” I assured him, even though he didn’t need to hear it. He knew.
“Yeah, I know,” he said with elevated confidence. “She can’t resist all this muscle.”
He ran his hands up and down his slight body.
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “You look like you haven’t had a solid meal in a few months.”
He was looking thinner than I’d ever see him.
Evan groaned. “I know. The MCAT and finals totally kicked my ass. I think I’ve lost twenty pounds since January.”
“Well let’s go put some of that weight back on. Steaks on me,” I said, as I took Cassie’s hand in mine. She’d been unnaturally quiet again, so I leaned over to her as we walked back to the car. “You still good?”
She nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I’m fine. I was just letting you have some brother bonding time. I don’t have siblings, but I know what it’s like when I haven’t seen Marley in a while. We can get a little crazy.”
“So I’ve witnessed,” I teased, remembering the first day I’d met Marley.
“Oh stop,” she said, playfully smacking me on the chest.
I laughed and put my arm around her, pulling her closer. “I love you,” I told her as we walked.
“I love you too,” she said as she squeezed me back.
“Did Dad take off?” Austin asked Evan as we started to walk back to the parking lot.
I tried to wrap my head around the fact that we didn’t have to call him that anymore. It was weird.
“Yeah, he did,” Evan said crisply.
“He was drunk, wasn’t he?” Austin questioned, and Evan nodded.
“He was,” he confirmed, shaking his head in frustration.
I knew it bothered him that the man he’d admired his whole life had fallen down so far that he couldn’t even manage to stay sober for his son’s graduation, but it wasn’t a surprise. We all knew he was a functioning alcoholic. I hadn’t expected him to show up sober, but Evan still had hopes that he could pull out of the depression he’d fallen into and get his life back on track. He missed the relationship they used to have, and I think it hurt him worse that our dad chose not to stick around to celebrate his graduation with him. Evan was bummed, I could tell. I couldn’t say that I shared his sentiments, but I did feel bad for him.
“That’s too bad,” I said, because it was what Evan needed to hear.
Cassie squeezed my hand, so I looked over and smiled at her. I knew it was her own silent way of telling me that she was there for me as I was still processing what I’d learned about my family. She returned my smile and leaned into me, so I threaded my arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer as we walked, my way of letting her know I was more than glad that she was there.
“What did Evan whisper to you when he hugged you?” I asked her then, because it was seriously killing me to not know what they’d been talking about.
She laughed. “He just asked if I was going to be sticking around for a while since he’d never seen you happier, and he knew I had something to do with it.”
“You have everything to do with it,” I told her, as I squeezed her against me. “You told him yes, right?”
She looked up at me and smiled. “Of course. I’m not going anywhere.”
I smiled back at her. “Great answer.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jared
I took Cassie’s hand in mind as we left work on Tuesday night. Dawn, the new night manager locked the door behind us.
“Have a good night, you guys,” she called out to us as she headed to her car.
“’Night, Dawn,” I told her as Cassie snuggled close to me and yawned.
“I’m tired,” she said, closing her eyes as we walked.
I laughed because she looked cute, but I knew she hadn’t been sleeping well. Ever since her revelation on Saturday, she’d been having trouble sleeping through the night. She’d stayed with me on Saturday night, and she’d woken up at three in the morning after a nightmare where the gunman realized we were both still alive and shot each of us in turn. She’d had some version of the same nightmare each night since. I hated that there was nothing I could do to help her.
“Do you want to stay with me tonight?” I asked her, hating the thought of her all alone in her bed. At least with me I could make her feel safe.
She nodded. “Yeah, but I need to get some stuff. Can you drop me at home, and I’ll walk over to your place?”
“Sure,” I said as I unlocked the doors to my truck. “Walk over while you still can. You won’t be able to do that once you move.”
She’d made the mistake of telling me on our way back from Coleman that her father told her he could get her into the University of Illinois for the fall semester, even though the deadline to apply had passed months ago. He was apparently connected to the nth degree, and could move collegiate mountains. But Cassie had turned him down. She’d told him she was staying in town for another year, which I thought was just about the worst decision she could have made. I was pissed that she wasn’t taking the opportunity to go to Illinois when it was being handed to her on a silver platter. I told her how I felt, and that had led to our first argument as a couple, and now, days later, even though I knew it was a sore spot, I again felt compelled to let her know my thoughts on the situation. I thought she should go.
She glared at me. “I told you I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are,” I told her, because I wanted her to take this step. I didn’t want her to hold herself back because she was afraid. “Illinois is a great school. They have a fantastic English department.”
“Good, then you go,” she said, sounding petulant.
“I will. In a year, I’ll be there with you. Hell, I already got in.”
She looked over at me in surprise. “You did?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, last fall I applied there just to see if I could get in. I was considering commuting back and forth for classes, but I wasn’t sure I could do it with work. I got accepted and deferred until next year. So all you have to do is be patient and enjoy living in Urbana-Champaign and going to an awesome school while I’m enviously living in my pool house for another year.”
She laughed. “Yeah, because your life is so hard,” she said sarcastically.
“Hey, I’m about to enter into another long distance relationship with my girlfriend after getting burned not even a year ago the last time I did this. I’m taking a huge risk.”
“No, you’re not,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “Jared, I’m fine here. I’ll take classes and work and live at home. Then next year I can figure out where I want to go. We can figure it out together. We don’t need to do long distance.”
“Cassie,” I said around a sigh. “Think about what you’re saying. It’s not that bad. An hour and a half drive is nothing. It’s hardly long distance. I was being dramatic. I seriously think you should do this. Just don’t let any of those preppy Illinois guys turn your head. It would seriously kill me if history repeated itself.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt then and slid across the seat toward me. She laced her arm through mine as my hand balanced on the stick shift. “Jared, I love you. You know that. I have no desire to test the University of Illinois waters to see if I can find someone better. I’ll tell you right now that I won’t.”
“Aww, that’s a good answer,” I said, turning my head for a kiss while keeping my eyes on the road. “Now get back over to your side before we get into an accident and you get hurt. I’d never forgive myself if that happened.”
She pouted but she moved back across the seat and buckled up again.
“It still doesn’t mean I’m going,” she said, pouting out the window.
I smiled and shook my head at her. I could tell I was wearing her down. Not that I wanted her to move, but it was an incredible opportunity. She needed to take it.
After I dropped Cassie off, spending only five minutes kissing her goodbye since I’d see her again in fifteen minutes, I headed home. As I walked around the back of the house toward the pool, I was surprised to find Austin sitting outside my door. He looked nervous, and I automatically expected the worst.
Since our dad – I still couldn’t break the habit of thinking of him as my dad. I knew it would take time, but since he’d dropped that bombshell on us, Austin had been surprisingly unfazed by it. I knew that since our dad pretty much ignored him in favor of praising Evan and badgering me for years, Austin might not have as strong of a reaction to learning that they weren’t related, but I kept waiting for the bomb to drop. He had to feel something about it.
“You okay, bro?” I asked him warily.
He shrugged, his gaze fixed on his Converse sneaker that he kicked rhythmically against the ground.
“Is it about Dad?”
He shook his head as if that wasn’t even something that would relatively upset him. I, on the other hand, was still trying to wrap my head around the news. I’d finally talked to Evan and told him what had unfolded before his graduation ceremony and a whole host of other things I’d kept bottled up for years. Evan had no idea that our dad had started hitting me after he’d left for college, nor had he known how bad things had truly gotten for Austin and me after our mom left.
He’d been shocked and pissed and a whole other assortment of emotions that made complete sense. First he’d wanted to call our dad and go off on him for being a heartless bastard. I’d told him not to waste his breath. I’d been dealing with the fact that the man hated me for so long that I just wanted to get past it. Now that I knew I had zero blood ties to him, I could let him go and not look back.
Evan hadn’t liked that answer, but he didn’t push me further. He’d just changed subjects to a topic we could both agree on. Our mother was a complete train wreck, and we couldn’t believe she’d allowed her husband to think that two of her three kids were his. And then she hadn’t bothered to tell Jean Luc that he was a father. It was so ridiculous I couldn’t even wrap my head around it, but I was processing. Evan wanted to call her and ream her out, but I wasn’t sure it would do any good.
Not that I was okay with what she did, but I didn’t think it would benefit any of us to tell her she’d made a mistake. She’d made tons of them in the last twenty years, and if she hadn’t realized along the way that her decisions were selfish and self-serving and hurt everyone she was supposed to love, well there wasn’t any way that she’d see it now.
Besides, I’d called her a few days earlier, and she hadn’t been remorseful in the least. At first she hadn’t wanted to talk about it at all, but I wouldn’t let her get off the hook. So she begrudgingly told me about how she only got married to my father because she was pregnant with Evan. She said she never loved him, but she knew she couldn’t leave him since he’d fight her for custody of Evan.
Then, when Evan was just a year old, she met Jean Luc at a bar in Chicago, and they started having an affair. He only came to the US every few months or so, but every time he’d come, they’d see each other. She got pregnant with me about a year after they started seeing each other, but she found out after Jean Luc was back in France, and in truth she wasn’t sure who the father really was, so she just assumed it was my dad. It wasn’t, and that was apparent when I was a few months old, but she never told my father or Jean Luc the truth.
A few years later, history repeated itself when she got pregnant with Austin. By then she was too caught up in the lie that she just kept on living it. It wasn’t until I was ten when my dad found out the truth. That was when he’d started giving me a hard time for being shy and qui
et and artsy. He hated me and my brother because we were a constant reminder of her infidelities, and even though he’d raised us, and we thought of him as our father, he couldn’t let it go.
The sad part was that had he just let go of his hated for our mother and loved us like his sons, he probably wouldn’t have been the miserable bastard that he was today, but he couldn’t do it. He was blinded by what she did to him, and when she left, he lost it.
Trying to keep my anger in check, I’d asked my mom if she planned on telling Jean Luc about Austin and me, and she said no, flat out, without even considering it. She said she hadn’t shared it in twenty years, and she was afraid that he’d leave her if he found out. They were happy, and they were in love, and that was all she cared about. As usual, she was only thinking about herself. And I couldn’t bring myself to care – much. But I had Googled Jean Luc just because I wanted to know more about my real father.
I found out he was a novelist, which I found to be comically ironic, but it was hard to laugh at the coincidence. But the craziest part was that I looked like him. I looked like a man I’d never met, who spoke French, lived in Paris and wrote French sci-fi novels. It was like I’d fallen into the Twilight Zone and landed in Europe. It was complete crazytown, and my mother was the fucking mayor.
“Don’t call him Dad,” Austin said sharply, pulling me back to the moment. “He’s not our dad – thank God. He’s a dick. And no, I’m not upset about that. I could care less – about him or Mom or Jean-fucking-Luc. You and Evan and the Larsons are my family. The people who birthed us and half-raised us can kiss my ass.”
Damn. I really should have corrected him for his use of creative profanity, but I didn’t have the heart to do it. He was so right. Maybe I just needed to embrace what he was saying. I had a great ‘family’ that had picked me. I didn’t need a shitty one that hadn’t wanted me in the first place.
“Then what are you upset about?” I asked him.
Of course, my next guess was that something had happened with Saylor. If he’d gotten her pregnant or hurt her in any way, I was going to kill him.
Paper Airplanes Page 36
